Zen and Hocus Pocus VS Chop Wood

Zen of this, Zen of that; there is a lot of honky hocus-pocus about Zen, ascribing to its adepts a mystical perspicaciousness unmet in ordinary beings. The word Zen is a Japanese transliteration of the Chinese word Chan, which is a transliteration of the Sanskrit word Dhyana, which translates in English to “meditation.” In a first millennium anecdote an acolyte inquirers of the master the essence of Zen. The master brandished before him his hossu. This act brought enlightenment to the acolyte. The hossu, which had become a ceremonial scepter, was the dried tail of a horse or donkey used as a fly-whisk. The adept was poetically suggesting our practice of meditation as the means of whisking away gnats, flies and mosquitoes of idle thoughts. Only that mind not in a haze of idle thoughts is in a position to address the question of the real. A mind not in a haze of idle thoughts acts without mediacy, and the outside observer will see a sometimes-preternatural perspicacity. It is this “sometimes-preternatural perspicacity” that has given rise to the Zen of this, the Zen of that, nonsense. Another first millennium adept once said that Zen (read meditation) is merely the brick with which we knock at the door.

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Chop Wood, Carry Water


In sweltering heat or a foot of snow
A bucket in each hand
I walk this path

Water to drink
Water to wash
Water arousing the mystery of water


The hand that poured concrete around an oak barrel
(the stave-marks remain)
Scrawled 1927 on the lip of the basin
From which I clean the silt
And chase the frogs
That creep under the lid I made against the detritus of nature



I sometimes sit by the spring
My mind dancing with the virgin water
From the spring to the creek
To the James, then to the White, and on to the Mississippi

And finally at home
In the great ocean



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